Journal of Jazz Studies vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 1-28 (2016) Approaching the Jazz Past: MOPDTK’s Blue and Jason Moran’s “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959” Tracy McMullen “Polemical traditions seem to valorize the literal” -Henry Louis Gates In October 2014, the jazz group Mostly Other People Do the Killing released their seventh album, Blue, a “painstakingly realized, note-for-note” re- performance of the classic 1959 album by the Miles Davis Sextet, Kind of Blue. Some jazz critics have described this album as “ingenious and preposterous” and “important.”1 Many of my fellow jazz scholars have been intrigued, wondering just how closely these artists come to re-performing the nuances of Miles or Coltrane or Evans. I have been far less impressed or intrigued. MOPDTK’s album is the product of a long Western tradition of understanding the art object, the artist, and history. Far from preposterous, ingenious, or even new, I argue this album is a stark example of comprehending jazz via a Western epistemology that informs “classical music” rather than, as one reviewer argues, a critique of this tendency. Using the 1939 Jorge Luis Borges story the band offers as liner notes as my pivot point, I argue that MOPDTK assumes an epistemology that privileges objectivity and an obsession with naming while suspecting the subjec- tive and what cannot be named. In an obtuse reading of the Borges story, bassist and bandleader Moppa Elliott asserts that we must have a new object in order to re-read the old one. An obsession with naming (that is, locating boundaries) breeds a fascination with difference, which is then found in a predictable place: racial difference. The album typifies how a Western qua postmodern worldview (dis)misses lessons that can be found in the jazz tradition. 2 To offer an example 1 New York Times and Jazz Times critic Nate Chinen described the album as “ingenious and 2 I am speaking of a strong epistemological strand within the Western tradition to divide a subject from an object in order to know—to privilege the “objective” over the subjective—and a preoccupation with “naming” in order to delineate this from that. Important descriptions and critiques of this epistemology can be found in Anzaldúa 2010 [1987], Derrida 1997 [1967], Trinh 2011, 1989. Further, I argue that Borges’ “Pierre Menard” lampoons this epistemology. “Classical music” is not tantamount to the “Western tradition.” Music associated with this genre also may be influenced by a variety of epistemologies. I use the phrase “jazz tradition” to index copyright by author 1 2 Journal of Jazz Studies of a jazz artist intent on learning such lessons, I conclude by describing pianist Jason Moran’s parlay of this fascination with strict reenactment in his perfor- mance, “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959.” While approached to do a precise restaging, Moran created instead a multi-media performance piece that revisits Thelonious Monk’s famous Town Hall Concert album and represents a different understanding of jazz, artistic influence, and history than that found in Blue. I find my argument obvious. So obvious that a reader could initially be skeptical that I am dimly missing the point of Blue: MOPDTK’s knowing irony about it all. But claiming “irony” can be a (perhaps unconscious) power grab (and I will highlight aspects of this project that are decidedly ironic, though not in any knowing way). My argument is necessary precisely because of the ways in which reviewers, scholars, and others uncritically embrace the epistemology that supports MOPDTK’s ostensibly shrewd engagement with jazz history and the jazz tradition. Blue consists of a track-by-track, solo-by-solo reenactment of Kind of Blue by the Miles Davis Sextet (Davis on trumpet, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto sax, John Coltrane on tenor, Wynton Kelly on piano on “Freddie Freeloader,” Bill Evans on piano for the rest of the album, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums). For the album, MOPDTK added pianist Ron Stabinsky to its regular line-up of Peter Evans on trumpet, Jon Irabagon on alto and tenor saxophones, Moppa Elliott on bass, and Kevin Shea on drums. Irabagon played both the Adderley and Coltrane roles by overdubbing some saxophone parts. Their intention was to mimic the performances as closely as possible in a type of “logical extreme” of a common pedagogical approach in jazz: copying jazz artists’ recorded performances.3 For example, the running time of each song is within seconds of the original. The group then released the recording in a simple glossy blue CD with lighter blue basic typescript on Elliott’s independent label, Hot Cup Records, named it Blue, and included as liner notes only this: Jorge Luis Borges’ 1939 short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” The ensem- ble consists of highly respected contemporary jazz musicians who are regularly recognized in Downbeat critics’ polls and who play with highly creative jazz characteristics attributed to African American musical practice, such as versioning and “repeating with a signal difference” (See Gates 2014 [1988], Mackey 1998, Monson 1996). These traditions are not hermetically sealed off from each other. For example, many jazz artists, black and white, approach jazz from a more “Western” angle, including, in my view, Wynton Marsalis, Charles Tolliver, and Moppa Elliott. And, of course, Western literature is replete with parody and irony, as Gates recognizes in his discussion of African American literary practices (2014 [1988]). There are many within the Western tradition who critique the tendency toward the subject-self/object- other split, for example, Cervantes (See Echevarría 2001). 3 See, for example, Berliner 1994, chapter four. Tracy McMullen/Approaching the Jazz Past 3 improvisers like guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Mark Dresser, trumpeter Dave Douglas and others. Blue is not the first of MOPDTK’s albums to engage with jazz in an ironic and pastiche-y fashion. Their first two albums, Shamokin!!! (Killing 2007) and This is Our Moosic (Killing 2008), use cover art that mimic classic jazz albums by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and The Ornette Coleman Quartet.4 While the album design and title differ from the original, the liner notes ap- pear to be the most overt and intentional “difference” between the original album and the copy. Both the name—Blue—and the album design pare down the original, simplifying and abstracting as one might expect for a work described as a “thought experiment” (Elliott and Elliott 2014). The liner notes, however, introduce a layer of complexity that the ensemble uses to contextualize their recreation. Borges’ story takes the form of a narrator glorifying his recently deceased and unjustly little-renowned literary friend, Pierre Menard, for his most grand and audacious project: to reproduce, nay, to produce again the novel Don Quixote word for word, originally, as if it had come from Menard himself. This unrecognized genius initially thought he would try to “become” Miguel Cervan- tes; he would learn 16th century Spanish, “return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918,” and then from this would be able to create the Quixote. But Menard came to believe this would be too easy. Rather, he took on a much more interesting task: to produce the Quixote from his place as a fin de siècle Frenchman. As Menard told the narrator, “Every man should be capable of all ideas and I believe in the future he shall be.” The irony and pleasure of Borges’s story rests upon the recognition that such a project is absurd. We will never be able to spontaneously re-produce a work of art that involves the complexity of Don Quixote.5 MOPDTK could be making a 4 Comments made in their liner notes and, to a lesser extent, the group’s style, have attracted charges of racism against the conservatory-trained band that has no African American members (Neuringer 2015b). I also have a problem with many of the liner notes, which can sound arrogant in their decontextualized understanding of jazz history. I do want to acknowledge, however, that the music on their original albums offer the spontaneity and creativity of the best jazz today. I would argue that those albums are closer to an “exact” reenactment of Kind of Blue than Blue. 5 “Pierre Menard” is one of Borges’ most famous and critically acclaimed stories. Scholars cite it as an example of the “death of the author” and rise of the text decades before Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and others made such claims in philosophy and semiotics (see, for example, Wood 2013, Williamson 2013). I suggest that Borges is also sending up a nascent breed of literary figures at the cusp of postmodernity and presaging (if not flatteringly) the rise of appropriation art. Marie-Laure Ryan writes that “Borges satirizes the efforts of a fictional early twentieth-century French author who devotes his life to an absurd project”—that of recreating Don Quixote word for word (Ryan 43). Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alistair Reid read this 4 Journal of Jazz Studies valid, but timeworn, statement with this. They could be pointing out that to the extent that jazz is copied but not developed—for example, by players who merely become master mimics of old styles—we are missing the point of what art is: to really re-create something great is to create your own “something great.” This would be a minor statement about how jazz is learned today and a critique informed by the tradition of Western conceptual art, not African American- based jazz practice.